Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (review)

Ian Duncan’s Scott’s Shadow is an invaluable study of historical, cultural, and literary developments in Romantic-era Edinburgh. The main goal of the book, which Duncan executes with rigor and authority, is to reposition Edinburgh—and its main cultural icon, Walter Scott—at the heart of the production and dissemination of culture that we identify as British Romanticism. Duncan offers a fascinating tour through the city’s bustling intellectual and literary scene at the time when this “Modern Athens” was “redefining itself as a new national capital” (9), a transformation concomitant with the emergence of two of the most dominant of Romantic genres: the periodical and the novel.

The first two chapters reveal Edinburgh at a momentous epistemic crossroads: the city’s rise to cultural ascendance demanded its abandoning of the Enlightenment ideal of professionalism, a “mixed ethos of public spirit, meritocracy, and corporate privilege” (26), in favor of a new “Romantic” discourse, one that pitted the emergent ideology of cultural nationalism against a Neoclassical system of thought based on Humean skepticism. At stake was the definition of and claim on national culture, and at the center of this cultural warfare stood two rival journals: the neo-Enlightenment, liberal Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the main architect of the counter-Enlightenment Romantic ideology.

The debate between the clashing ideologies of culture had an enormous impact on the evolvement of the ascendant literary genre of the period, the Scottish novel. In a chapter on “Economies of National Character,” Duncan focuses on what he calls “the Scottish school of domestic national fiction” (xv), founded by, as he interestingly claims, the Irish Maria Edgeworth, and practiced in Scotland by Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, and John Galt, all of whom wrote in the shadow of Walter Scott, the “Great Unknown.” Duncan commendably gives these under-studied novelists their due, convincingly pointing to a paradox that riddles their works: local culture, even when recognized by these novelists as the material that flavors their fictions, inevitably fails the test of modernity—and its analogue, improvement—under whose exigencies it eventually devolves into inassimilable dirt. Ultimately, Duncan argues, Scottish fiction before Scott “bears a didactic program that disciplines not only its character but its readers, by activating an aesthetics of enjoyment (in local color) which it then suppresses and disavows” (72).

Scott’s subsequent achievement is to eschew this “pedagogic sentence of renunciation” (91) by valorizing dirt “as the very medium of culture, rather than its lack”(90). Refreshingly, Duncan refuses to gloss Scott’s intervention in the literary production of culture as an assertion of the novelist’s political conservatism. In many ways, Scott’s Shadow offers a valuable lesson in reading Scott well. For Duncan, this entails the dispelling of the critical consensus that too often reduces the Waverley novels to expressions of British imperial ideology. Consequently, Duncan argues for a revolutionary impulse behind Scott’s post-Waverley works such as Rob Roy (1818), one that pulls away from teleological visions of history and settles, quite comfortably, in a historicist’s (almost Benjaminian) uncertainty, in “the obscure, occult, bewildering shapes and forces of the present” (114). Rather than accusing Scott of promoting false consciousness, Duncan analyzes the Waverly novels under a far more productive rubric of “double consciousness” (xiv), an ironic sensibility that allowed Scott to spell “a skeptical disillusionment with reality” even as he avowed “a sentimental attachment” to it (xiv).

This skeptical duality in Scott’s novelistic vision, according to Duncan, best testifies to Hume’s influence on Scott (contra John Gibson Lockhart, whose Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk [1819] misconstrued Scott as a figurehead of conservative Romantic ideology by eliding his Enlightenment roots). Throughout the book, Duncan stresses the import of Hume’s legacy—his recognition of the fictive underpinnings of “the conventional, the customary, the everyday” (136)—for both the development of the novel and Scott’s legitimation of the genre as the dominant form for representing reality. It...